Trevor looks at the cockerel. Meets its eyes, square on. It tilts its head at him, jerky, puzzling – takes a step towards Trevor, another, until he can reach out a finger to chuck it under the beak. “I did this to the prison barber,” Trevor says, so low I want to ask him to repeat it. “The mirrors, he was frightened of me, and I looked at him, and…” A bone-deep shudder. “I could have told him to slit his own throat and he’d have done it. I could smell the blood inside his skin…”
This man who’d paid near two years of his life to witness with his body that to raise a hand against another is never the way – “What did you do?”
He looks up, picture of misery. Scratch of nails on the bricks as the cockerel takes wing. “Asked him for a short back and sides.”
The smile startles out of me like the flapping cockerel. “Not enough ruddy brilliantine in the world to make that look right with you.”
He sets the hen down onto her feet on the cobbles, leaving her to make her unsteady affronted way back towards the coop. “Wouldn’t know, would I.”
Can’t but put my arm round his shoulders, can I, my husband, my Trevor. “Come back in?”
Lily is the only person in the kitchen now, mopping at a spill of jam on the table with a furious glower on her face. “Why do we marry them, I ask you? – Not you, bach,” she adds when she sees I’ve her brother with me, small fond smile for the ridiculousness of our lives. (Hard sometimes not to be envious of Lily, thirty soon and married to a house-holder. Do we claw at each other because we’ve not got all that we wanted? Or do we retreat into our separate troubles?) “Trevor, I was talking with Helen and we’re thinking that even if Meeting can’t spare the money to send the both of you back over to the Continent, I’m certain they’ll at least be able to help you sort out what you mean to do for work and all?”
Been weighing on her mind something terrible, what her brothers are to do with themselves now. Though Ned’s his soldier’s pension, small token for it all but more than anyone would grudge for my husband. Trevor half-turns from where he’s gone to wash barnyard-smelling hands under the tap. From his face he’s picturing what even Friends will be able to do to find positions for anyone from this notorious family of conchies and suffragists. “Not the civil-service I don’t think,” Trevor says. The irony, that he’d have the vote now if he’d not chosen to go to prison. “Go back to helping Aled-mawr maybe?” (And how long will it be that we’re still calling his uncle that, when will we forget the why of it now Aled-bach rests in Flanders?) “Or Da.”
“You’re wasted as a builder or a baker and you know it,” I say.
Lily’s pinched look speaks to how she’s more than ready to see any of the men in her life find bloody something already. Thread of normality to pluck at, as if one small worry can displace all the greater. I take Trevor’s hand and tug him towards the stairs. I can hear the denial of tears in Iris’s voice in the front room, where Violet must be giving her as much of a talking-to as I imagine Violet capable of. But upstairs all is still, just quiet breathing from the room where Trevor’s aunt’s been looking after Lily’s girls and poor Daisy’s little Rhys. As well to have got them all down at once, Nora’s still not been up to much after the ‘flu. We creep past that door, and then the bedroom that Iris still shares with Violet, and Ned’s ajar and a shambles, to our own scant refuge from care.
Suppose we can get on with setting up house on our own now the war is behind us. Suppose we all can, except Iris. Funny how that’s not even occurred to me till just now, where she’d go. We’re all still travelling on the rails the past laid down when the train’s lost its bloody wheels. I’ll be organising another march for the vote next.
We’ve still not got electric in the bedrooms. I strike a match for the lamp and set it back beside the basin, doesn’t altogether chase aside the grey dim of a day that’s never going to go fair but enough for this. The dressing-table arches into an accusing void where a mirror ought to be. I’ve been fixing my hair in the largest shard Iris missed, sliver now of myself standing alone at the edge of the bed beside my husband.
His shaving-soap’s not been touched since he’s been home, or nearly – he’d have tried, surely, but I can guess how that had gone, without having the sight of his face in a glass. Trevor’s brows crease into a dark question when I reach to pick it up. “No, Helen, why…?”
“Herbert is right, you know, you’re a bit of a sight. I think I can help you get tidied up?”
The frown is deepening into a proper scowl. “Hardly an invalid.”
“We have to do something with you, can’t go about looking as if – as if you’re about to run off to the hills to paint yourself blue.”
That’s got me a smile, at least. Both of us that proud streak all the way back to when it was the Romans we were wanting out of our country. When I come back in from fetching hot water from the bath Trevor’s sat himself in the chair at the dressing-table, gazing absently at the blank-faced oval of the missing mirror as he twirls in his fingers the white feather of cowardice that chit had handed him, when the shame ought to have been hers. “Suppose I ought to get on with learning, yeah. Blind men can do it, after all.”
I’m not going to tell him what I’d seen a blinded man do, in one swift moment when his nurse had set down the razor. I dampen the brush and draw it in sturdy swirls across the face of the cake of soap. How many times I’d watched my new husband do this in those few blissful months before the review-board and the letters from the ambulance-corps and the decision we’d made that even this service was still complicity in the act of war. Better to go to prison, than make it one bit easier for someone else to kill in our names.
(He’d come to see me in my sentence over the demonstration and when we were only stepping out, but I’d not been let to visit him. Barely given leave to write, he was. Should have been there to meet him – should have been there with our baby in my arms. Should, should, should. First casualty of war.)
Trevor closes his eyes as I touch the lathered brush to his face, as if he can’t bear to look at me. (No, he’s just imagining how to guide his own hand without a glass.) “Smells nicer than the barber’s soap,” he says.
“Keep yourself still, do you want to lose an ear?”
I have a go at pulling the safety-razor in a slow stroke down his cheek. At least he’s young enough never to have even tried to fuss with a cut-throat for himself, father a sensible enough man to have started his sons straight on the newest miracle of modern invention. Trevor reaches up to join his fingers to mine on the handle, easing the angle. “More like…”
And then it’s just the soft rasp of the blade against whiskers, his patient submission to a necessity he’d never have asked of me. Not a drop of blood spilt, when I’ve finished. I’m proud of that, I believe.
We’ll sort what’s to be done for his hair when it comes to it.
Trevor’s still not looking at me even as he wipes his chin with the flannel. “Can imagine Ned’s first go at shaving,” he says.
It had involved muttered words that I’m ashamed to admit I knew and Violet on her knees in the bath quietly sweeping up bits of the one mirror in the house that Iris wouldn’t get to break. (We try not to think badly of Ned, that if he’d felt led to run out and bloody enlist it was his to say. But I know we’ve all thought it. As well we’re not Ireland, I can only think what he’d be off about.) “Ned’s still Ned,” I say. “More’s the pity.”
“Least he can walk down the shops and go to a barber. Be happy to see him, call him a hero and all.” And at last he lifts those great slate-coloured eyes to mine, moody as a storm coming in over the water. “You deserve better than this, Helen, you should leave me.”
I’ve seen this look before, in Rouen and Cologne and the streets of my own city. Glaring limbless men feeling themselves useless, dangerous, unmanned. Women who only stared at nothing our innocent eyes could see. The children who’d given up hope of love or bread. “Stood up in front of Meeting and promised, w
e did. Not forgotten that?” I can’t but tch at him, the look dawning in those glorious eyes. “I love you, Trevor, always have, since you brought me the sandwiches. Though why you brought me a pot of tea when I was chained to a bloody railing–”
He’s laughing in a way could have been sobs, only the flash of those dear crooked eyeteeth as his mouth turns up with every breath tells me which. “Ought to have known you’d be that stubborn.”
His lips taste of soap when I lean forward, soap and old iron and the promises we’d made to one another in that naive conviction that the world couldn’t really be so mad as all that. Bother being proper anyway, his cool hands warming against my skin as we sort our way out of suddenly too many clothes (could have been my Nain’s old corsets, catch me outside of a shirtwaist ever again) until at last at last we lie tangled in touch, the old bedstead singing our joy to the rest of the house and half the bloody street for all that we’re minding it. Thinking only, this. I want this. I want you.
And, in the sudden breathless quiet after, somewhere from down below a voice sounds like Iris shouting that we can bloody well shut it. Trevor rumbles a chuckle and buries his face in my neck. Barest hint of teeth brushing my skin, before he sighs, and tucks his head against me, with a murmur: “Wi wedi golli di.” I have missed you.
O, Lord, I have my husband back, and he is himself. Whatever else he may also be, he is himself, and we shall relearn what that means, to us both, together.
Art by Eric Orchard
Across the Seam
by Sunny Moraine
* * *
1897
Lattimer, Pennsylvania
So I might forget time, forget the world
My native land
My beloved land
I might find again, as in a blessed dream
– Petro Trokhanovskii
trans. from the Russian by Elaine Rusinko
It was not a battle because they were not aggressive, nor were they on the defensive because they had no weapons of any kind and were simply shot down like so many worthless objects; each of the licensed life takers trying to outdo the others in the butchery.
– Inscription on monument erected at Lattimer, 1972
In his dreams, Baba Yaga sets fire to the seam and dances with him as it burns.
This is the last thing she does, after the rest of the show she puts on for him – a show, she has always given him to understand, that she does not organize for his entertainment but hers. That first night, cold and alone and curled against a stoop with black dust choking his nostrils and coating his throat, without even yet the hard bed at the boarding house to make sleep a less terrible thing, she had come to him in her chicken-legged dacha, waving her spoon and laughing as if he was the funniest thing she had ever seen.
Well, look at this. All curled up like a cat – except no cat would ever put up with such cold. You’re a long way from home, little dochka.
I’m not your daughter, he would have said, but one didn’t argue with Baba Yaga, not even in dreams, unless one wanted to find oneself up to the neck in a soup pot. Instead he kept silent, then, and looked at the knobby chicken knees of her house and not at her crouching on her porch like a hunched black bird, pointing at him with her spoon.
The streets of the coal camp are muddy now and they were muddy then, only then the mud was half ice and somehow sucked and pulled even worse than when it was merely waterlogged. Men lost shoes. But the house of Baba Yaga seemed entirely unconcerned as it stood there.
But of course, it was a dream.
Don’t you turn your gaze away from me, dochka. Don’t sulk. I came a long way for you, and bad manners make a good supper. Look up at me, curtsy, and pay me a proper thank-you when you meet my eyes.
It was as if the spoon had become a sword and pierced him through. She knew. Her eyes were like brittle knives when she laughed at him again. Every part of her was sharp. Every part of her might carve, slice, alter.
So now he looks forward to his dreams.
* * *
Every day is much the same.
Out of bed before the sun; cold coffee and bread so dry it crumbles in his mouth. The boarding house smells like unwashed socks and stale drink, but he no longer notices it. He has been in the camp two weeks but his overalls are already worn as if he’s had them for years and his boots badly need resoling. He covers his head with the hard shell of his helmet. He rubs the chin stubble that he’s come to hate, but as yet he doesn’t have enough company scrip to afford a good straight razor.
He is sixteen years old.
Iwan. Sometimes he’s sure the shafts are whispering his name under the growls and coarse laughter of the other men. It began his first time down and he hasn’t talked to anyone about it since then. Many days, he’s sure that he’s insane. When he sees the chicken-legged dacha in the center of the street. When the shafts speak to him. When he looks at the dresses of the boarding house’s proprietress, her neatly coifed hair under her scarf, her hands – somehow both rough and delicate – and feels a yearning that has nothing to do with wanting her the way a man should want a woman.
He knows that he’s broken.
Iwan, Baba Yaga murmurs to him as he staggers home under the weight of the coal dust and the low ceiling of the shaft, his back bent for so many hours that it is as though he carries the weight of the entire mountain on his shoulders. My little Iwanka. They don’t know who you really are. Let us discuss what might happen if they find out.
* * *
The low mountains of western Pennsylvania are greening now, coming out of a winter so brown and barren and long that he had wondered if it might end at all. A few times there had been snow – which at least was familiar – but there was much more ice than snow, cold rain that leached into the bones and settled there, and everywhere dead vegetation like the earth herself was dying. At first, looking at the mine, seeing the dark scar of it and the black hell inside, he had wondered if its poison was seeping outward and infecting everything.
What have I come to, he had wondered then. God.
He no longer believes that God cares about him.
So now green life is creeping back into the mountains, but in his dreams, perhaps to torture him, Baba Yaga sits him behind her on her spoon and they fly across the ocean and back to the rolling green mountains, dear and distant – and his heart aches as if it wants to burst from his chest and bury itself in the soil of his birth.
You have to remember, Baba Yaga says, no mocking laughter in her voice now, where you came from. Such things can sustain you when nothing else does.
He shakes his head, in his dream, in his sleep, on his flat boarding house pillow, his thin blanket gathered around his shoulders. I have nothing now. Not even this. Why are you showing this to me?
Baba Yaga does a little jig, more to prove a point than out of any personal glee. She lowers her spoon and scoops up the earth, pours it into his outstretched hands. It is nothing like the coal. Iwanka, you are soft and deep like this here. And you can be hard like the mountain into which you dig. You must be both in order to survive.
* * *
On the worst nights he dreams of the ship pulling into the harbor, the great statue lifting her torch over everything, the cold look in her eyes. Everyone else leaned over the deck and chattered, excited, and he thought of little birds flitting through his dense forests. She was welcoming to them, or they thought she was. But he looked up at her and he saw no welcome at all, and began to wonder if he had made a mistake.
The same coldness in the man with his many papers spread out in front of him.
Name? Place of origin? Are you literate? Where are you going? Is anyone meeting you there? He had stumbled through it in broken English, the little he had managed to scrape together in the passage. Iwan Charansky. Austria-Hungary. No. Lattimer.
No.
I am alone.
It was like confession. He hung his head and felt his cheeks burn.
* * *
The
warmth of the stove in the early mornings. The lowing of the cattle, the soft jangle of their bells as he takes them to the fields. The sun rising over the mountains. Fresh paskha and pirohi with cheese. His father fixing prosfora and seed inside his pouch as he goes to plow the field, without which a good harvest will not be assured. Candlelit gilt and wood in the church, the knowing eyes of the saints in the ikonostas. Trying on his mother’s best dress alone in the house, the terror of being caught. A scatter of grain in the sunlight like little beads of gold. Ice silvering the trees.
Screams. Fire – fire to consume a family that to others were always strangers, fire to consume the worrysome and the unwanted. Fire to consume the world.
Baba Yaga hands him this fire, like a fist, like a little burning heart in his cupped palms, and he understands that he has carried it with him from the green hills and across the ocean, and it is part of him now.
The seam, dochka. Give it to the seam.
This place is almost ready to burn.
* * *
Nights in the boarding house are becoming more interesting. Louder, more people, squeezing together in Big Mary’s kitchen, listening to her talk. Sometimes he stands in the doorway and listens too. What’s done to them. What might be done. Big Mary is offering fragments of another world, holes through which to glimpse it, like gold nestled in the coal. Something he has never imagined, let alone seen. Big Mary offers exhortations to the promise of America, to the rights of men, and the men nod and bang their mugs on the table and cry agreement. Some. Others sit silently, their arms folded, and he can tell that they have yet to be convinced. But they’re listening.
Behind him, he can feel Baba Yaga folding the spindles of her fingers and grinning. She whispers, This is also my dochka. She knows me, even if she doesn’t call me by name. Look at her: wouldn’t she make a tasty stew? But her spirit is too big for my pot, and I have other uses for her. She is also carrying the fire. My fire.
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 6
